Well then they really need to change it then. French just doesn't go over well with English-speaking people, who comprise most of the computing world.

Wrong on all points. French goes over great with English-speakers, which only makes sense as English is about 30% French to begin with! And English-speakers are nowhere near the majority even among computer-users only, in fact we are a fast shrinking minority.

Of course, "FreeOffice" just sounds cheesy and crappy (since "free" typically has some bad connotatio

Of course, "FreeOffice" just sounds cheesy and crappy (since "free" typically has some bad connotations, evoking the line "you get what you pay for"), and stupid English doesn't have separate words for free/beer and free/speech, so I have no idea what would be a good alternative.

I was expecting them to sue. Seriously. Oracle is just the snotty kid on the block with the only basketball; the one who always takes the ball and goes home instead of accepting that everyone else is just better.

They forked the project, and then asked Oracle to donate the name to them. While, at the same time, asking Oracle to join the "new" foundation.

Now, I know Oracle itself didn't put a lot of work into OO.org, but Sun did (something tells me OO.org's codebase is 90% the work of paid Sun employees - correct me if I'm wrong), and so now all that work is Oracle's by right.

So, say you spent 5 years making an awesome program, and made it GPL and everything. You did the vast majority of the work. Then, some guy says, cool, I'm gonna fork it. "Ok, fine, go for it." Oh, also, I'm gonna need the name...

How about... go fuck yourself, sir.

There is obvious financial value in the name, and that value was Sun's, and is now Oracle's.

The Document Foundation's members put a lot of work into OO.org.
Suppose you spend over 10 years on making an awesome program, and then some company buys out the name and doesn't let you use it.
The Document Foundation has done a lot more for OO.org than Oracle will ever do. It's a crime that Oracle is allowed to have their clutches on it.

Citation please? Because last time I heard a great deal of the work done on Open Office was PAID for by Sun, which Oracle shelled out serious cash to buy, which INCLUDES the work done by Sun. Do you think all that money was a donation? And forking it is one thing, but asking for the name as well? I would have told them exactly where to go jump. It was rude, it was some serious attitude, and it was frankly uncalled for. Hell if I was Oracle I'd just take it proprietary and see how long the Libreoffice can keep up with $0 in work coming from Oracle.

It is easy to say you do all the work, when you don't let anyone else in. The problem of accepting patches was the whole reason behind go-oo. Which make me wonder... Why fork again? Will they join forces? Terrible name if the do.. LO-GO:)

Q: What does this announcement mean to other derivatives of OpenOffice.org?

A: We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit.

I find it pretty silly that they couldn't see the conflict of interest. (I find it more silly that anyone thinks a serious meeting could take place over IRC... but that's another discussion). Their product is competing to replace Open Office as the dominant office suite. It would be like Bill Gates being a board member for Microsoft and Apple. You can contribute. You can own stock. But to be in a leadership position is just ridiculous

When SUN opensourced OpenOffice many years ago, they promised to create a independent foundation for it. All this time, the LibreOffice contributors have been waiting for the foundation, assigning their (costly) code contributions to SUN, and watching how SUN released his propietary version using their (costly) code contributions. They hoped that their self-imposed copyright donation would have a meaning they day SUN created the foundation, but the situation never had an end. After Oracle killed the OpenSolaris foundation, they decided to react quickly. It's Oracle who owes these guys an explanation.

Actually it's the folks at SUN who promised to create an independent foundation and then didn't, who owe the explanation. Then again the contributors who poured in their valuable contributions and watched, and waited and hoped are likewise culpable - expectations do not a legally binding commitment make.

All this time, the LibreOffice contributors have been waiting for the foundation, assigning their (costly) code contributions to SUN, and watching how SUN released his propietary version using their (costly) code contributions

I was under the impression that Star Office was OpenOffice.org with Sun's proprietary contributions:

Who exactly are you claiming did this? The people who originally created StarOffice, which became OpenOffice, worked for Star Division, a company that was bought by Sun. Since then, the contributions were roughly 80% Sun employees, 15% Novell, 5% everyone else. OpenOffice has been open source for less than ten years, so the only people who can claim to have spent 10 years working on it have been paid to do so by Star Division, Sun, and Oracle.

Technically, remember, that OOo is basically a dressing up and improving of Star Office, started by a German company, so if you want to attribute 90% of the work to someone, I'd put it there, but I don't think, at this point, you can contribute 90% to one entity.

Granted, Star Office, both program and company, were bought by Sun, but a lot of the work was done well before Sun stepped in and bought it.

And, I know it's a small detail, but it can matter legally, it's not GPL, it's LGPL. There are differences.

The obvious problem with your view of the situation isOO.org is GPL, the part of the copyright and trademarks may belong to Oracle, but not all. As a whole, Oracle does not "own" the project.

I can understand the move, several community members feel Oracle is going to be bad for the future of OO.org, and the project would be betterin the hands of a non-profit foundation.

Besides, there this is not the first fork (go-OO), and it is a sign that the project structure at OO.org is detrimental for the project. A similar, yet different situationhappened with XFree86. Did you ever try to ask yourself why community members would try to do something drastic as a fork? It is to get rid of the rot.

The council members would like to stay in the council because they think that even while separate, LibreOffice and others can be part of a bigger community, having similargoals but different rules. So all officesuites can be part of the same foundation. I do not see a COI there, this is not a company, but an OS project. The interests of the two project are largely identical. Only the way how to actually do it maybe different.

As most of the code was written by employees of companies Oracle bought, Oracle does own the copyrights. They also own the trademarks.

Of course its a conflict of interests. They are working on a competing product. Its like a Windows developer contributing to WINE.

I also cannot find any clear explanation of why the fork is necessary. This is very different from XFree86 where there was a clear problem. I would have thought that Oracle has both the resources and the will to rival MS Office.

It doesn't matter who did most of the work on OpenOffice--Sun employees or outside developers--without the open source, open format tie-in, the software would have been just another proprietary, slightly incompatible Microsoft Office clone, and it would have died long ago.

Yeah, it's their right to keep the name, if the open source people really want to prove that open source is better anyway they should just make the fork better and let the market decide. It was also pointed out that the name actually sucks so maybe this is really a good thing, as long as they don't use that gay LibreOffice name.

I actually like the name LibreOffice more than OpenOffice. Also, a new name gives them a chance to shed the negative baggage that was associated with the OpenOffice name while still being able to point back to it for creditability.

I like how the LibreOffice name lets them dispense with insisting that the program is technically named OpenOffice.org, even though no one calls it that, as a trademark circumvention. I can appreciate the problem they had, but naming the program after its own website is just silly.

It doesn't....but tacking an english word onto a french makes a lot of sense if you want to expand into Canada. However since there are more letters in 'office' than 'libre' they may still fall foul of the Quebec language police for being more english than french.

The "cuba libre" drink is said to be the result of US intervention in Cuban independence from Spain.It might have something to do with revolutionaries, but not communist at all.It also makes you think of Coca Cola, that's a capitalist icon if there is one.

What's funny is that Coca-Cola bottled in America tastes like shit, even though that's its homeland where its capitalist roots lie. But Coca-Cola bottled in many other countries (like various Central American countries) tastes great, since it's made with cane sugar instead of HFCS.

I know this is OT, but I have to call you out for using "gay" as a pejorative here. If you think it's stupid, call it that. If you think it's idiotic, call it that. If you think it's bad branding, say so. But don't call it "gay" for the same reason you wouldn't call it a "n*****" name.

Unless, of course, you mean it's a name that invokes joyful frolicking.

I'm sorry, but your part in deciding the social mores of the society in which you live is actually quite minuscule. Maybe if you were actually gay, your opinion might have a little more weight, but given that 1) most gay people are offended by that use of the word and 2) you are trying to redefine it based on your own ignorant prejudices, I'm guessing you're not. (Incidentally, that's probably why you are not offended and why you think there's nothing wrong with using the word in that manner.)

"gay" has meant "full of joy and mirth" or "brilliant, showy" since around the 13th century. Victorians used the words "mandrake" or "buggerer" to disparage homosexual men. Or just "homosexual"; that was bad enough.

However, "gay" began to take on the meaning of "promiscuous" or "male prostitute" (who sleeps with men or women, not exclusively men) around the late 19th century. It took until the 1930s to become established as slang for homosexual men.

Would it kill the story submitter to give people like me with no background in open source politics some info on what the heck is LibreOffice, why was it forked and is this latest development good or bad? I occasionally use Go-oo to open incompatible files but that's about it. Wikipedia and Libreoffice's website aren't much help either. So, someone knowledgeable, please reply below. Thanks in advance.

LibreOffice is a fork of OO.org that was started because of Oracle's buyout of Sun. They asked Oracle to donate the OO.org name to their fork, and now Oracle has kicked them out of the OO.org community counsel. Hard to say if it's good or bad, but it looks to be the start of a fight.

LibreOffice is a fork of OO.org that was started because of Oracle's buyout of Sun. They asked Oracle to donate the OO.org name to their fork, and now Oracle has kicked them out of the OO.org community counsel. Hard to say if it's good or bad, but it looks to be the start of a fight.

FuckYouOffice would be a good name given the turn of events. And very counter-culture/rebellious.

In everyday usage, it could be shortened to FuckOff, like:
"What's that Open Source office suite you are using?"
"FuckOff."
"Wow, thanks. Gotta get me some of that."or
"How can I convert this mysterious ODF document into Word format to read it on my Win98 computer?"
"FuckOff."
"Thank you, helpful person."

It's a name that could work well for FOSS.

But perhaps UpYoursOffice might be better because that sounds more like European-bastardized English and less Japanese than FuckYouOffice. But it's not as much fun.

Almost anything is better than LibreOffice. Obviously LibreOffice did not wind up with any of the marketing people in the divorce.

Actually, if Oracle were smart, they'd realize they DO have a good use for OOo, which is to unseat MS's virtual monopoly in office software. Oracle is no friend of MS, and MS Office is MS's cash cow and one of the main reasons (Outlook/Exchange being the other) why Windows is basically mandatory for corporate desktop computers. If OOo became an accepted replacement, or better yet the preferred office suite (as Firefox has become in browsers), a lot of companies would no longer really need Windows. If Ora

I think the short summary is that OpenOffice.org development is heavily dominated by one company who is slow to accept outside patches, requires copyright assignment and controls the direction it develops in, So far this has only lead to a set of extra patches (Go-oo), but with Sun being bought by Oracle the other contributors expect the situation to get worse and have decided to try reforming it as a community project. They've called it LibreOffice as Oracle owns the name but would ideally like to come to terms with Oracle and continue under the OpenOffice.org name. At least initially it seems that Oracle refuses the idea, and as they then see LibreOffice as a competing project this is bad news but not unexpected. I didn't expect Oracle to hand over the control so easily and suspect Oracle will not budge until most everybody else stand behind LibreOffice.

Actually no.Slashdot is FOSS centered but also covers a multitude of other sins, look at the one on near-nuclear disasters in the US for example.My background knowledge of this particular story could be summarised as

Sun bought Star Office several years back

Sun released the Star Office sources and founded OpenOffice, while still releasing a non-free version under the original name

OpenOffice became more and more important over the years, but the lion's share of the development was funded by Sun

Oracle bought MySQL but this did not work out too well. A central problem was that MySQL is a free competitor to Oracle's main product (simplifying things a lot!!)

Oracle bought Sun, thus acquiring Java and OpenOffice. They were not the reason for the buyout.

loss?

That is simply general knowledge and does not adequately explain the background to this confrontation.

Sun bought MySQL. Oracle bought Sun and MySQL came along with it.Anyway, Oracle DB and MySQL are not really competitors. Oracle would be overkill for a typical MySQL project, and MySQL wouldn't be up to the task of replacing a typical Oracle installation.

Oracle would be overkill for a typical MySQL project, and MySQL wouldn't be up to the task of replacing a typical Oracle installation.

Even if Oracle is overkill it's not that uncommon to have enterprise situations where you're 'standardized' on oracle, in which case you get a lot of databases forced onto the overkill system. The competition between Oracle and MySQL would be the chance that enterprises used both a mysql farm _and_ an oracle farm, using the oracle farm only for the applications that needed it

I noticed that as well. It doesn't speak well of the Oracle people involved, since it essentially means they see Libre Office, which truly wants to remain free, as competition, and they only reason they'd see it that way is if Oracle's goals, which have not yet been stated, involved some way to tighten controls on OOo.

Or is it as easy as releasing a "new version" with a new version number and including an "updated license"?

If they have required copyright assignment for outside contributions, which OO has, it's that easy. For projects without copyright assignment it's much more difficult, as you have to have the agreement of all contributors (excepting automatic update clauses like the GPLs GPL version X or later).

Of course, you cannot retroactively change the license, so previously released code would remain viable to use for a fork.

If you had any sense you'd have done that years ago. I can't fathom why anyone would use MySQL in this day and age. It's like a toy compared to most of the other DBMS's. The only upside I see to it is that it's free (as in beer - that's the only one many care about). If it was the only game in town, then sure, that factor would be worth using it for certain stuff. You get that with PostgreSQL too though, and you actually get a well written and capable DBMS.

For the inevitable car analogy: I drive a Hyundai because I'm a cheap bastard and it works well enough. If when I was looking to get my car though, someone had given me my choice of either a free Hyundai (MySQL) or a free Audi (PostgreSQL), I can guarantee you I wouldn't be driving the Hyundai.

If you're a hobbyist developer MySQL has a couple advantages. It's the usual database in ready-to-go web server packages for Windows, which means it's much more convenient on that platform. Also, many of the tutorials you find online assume MySQL. Last but not least, most cheap hosters give you a couple MySQL databases but if you want Postgres you'll often have to get a root server and install it yourself.

Yes, this boils down to "the network effects are on MySQL's side" but for people who don't need anyth

Many cheap hosting companies don't offer PostgreSQL because there's not enough demand for it; there's not enough demand because people don't know where to host the result, and therefore don't develop against it. You have to break that dependency one person at a time to start reversing the network effect here. There's a list of PostgreSQL Hosting companies [postgresql.org] that includes multiple entries in the sub $10/month range. So while it's still true that most cheap hosting companies don't support it yet, if you dema

I predict within six months "OpenOffice" will be dead and "LibreOffice" (or similar community-owned fork) will have supplanted it. Linux distros will drop it like a hot potato, and Novell and IBM sure aren't going to tie themselves to a hostile third-party for their efforts.

That is not what he said. He said, "Office productivity software is a critical component of the free software desktop, and the Ubuntu Project will be pleased to ship LibreOffice from The Document Foundation in future releases of Ubuntu." I see no timeline and no commitment in that statement. Just a statement of support for an option...

Didn't the license change [wikipedia.org] drive much of the switch to x.org? I recall, and Wikipedia confirms, that Keith Packard had been trying some of his own things before then, but I don't recall that they were going very far. I thought that his treatment, then the change in license was what made the difference.

So far, OO.o is distributed under the same license. I seem to recall that Fedora (Red Hat) and Ubuntu (Canonical) will support LibreOffice for now, but do they have any obligation to do so? If LO doesn't draw other support, then what will stop them from running, hat in hand (so to speak), back to OpenOffice? What if Oracle throws lots of resources behind OO.o, overshadowing the efforts that LO makes?

For the record, I tend to think that you're right. I'm just not willing to "predict" such an outcome for now. I can see circumstances which could drive it in either direction, or even a third direction, in which there's a great deal of cooperation between OO.o and LO.

Conversely, Oracle can simply change the license on OO.o, should they so choose. They own all of the copyright, no?

They can, but they can't retroactively retract it on the existing code. That code has already been licensed under the GPL and is out there. If they change the license, only the future changes to the code could remain closed source. What LibreOffice has already forked could and would be further developed separately. You can bet at that point the Linux distros would drop the closed source Oracle version for sure.

At this point, assuming that the developers behind LibreOffice stay active, I really don't see the Oracle version remaining in use.

The interesting question is how much developers are in each group. X.org was more successful than XFree not the least because a huge chunk of actively contributing devs was with that project.

With OO.org, I'm not so sure. In the past I've heard claims that most code - especially the core stuff, rather than various beautifications like Gtk & KDE theming, better icons etc - is maintained by Sun employees; that would be Oracle employees now (or most of them, anyway).

Their webpage hasn't been touched in 2 years, with most of it static for around 4+ years now. Their last release was in 2008, which was XFree 4.8.0 which apparently mostly just replicated some features from Xorg and fixed some bugs. I can guarantee you the support for any modern hardware is missing.

Most importantly - no Linux distributions that I'm aware of have used the XFree server in quite a few years now. FreeBSD doesn't use it anymore and I don't think the other BSDs do either.

You should be modded up because I think your more nuanced take on the matter is a clearer way to think about the issue. I also happen to agree with you. I tend to think the LibreOffice will become the version of choice, but I don't think it's 100% or even 90% certain.

I can see circumstances which could drive it in either direction, or even a third direction, in which there's a great deal of cooperation between OO.o and LO.

Oracle just made the third direction a lot harder. A normal member of the Open Source community would've seen the writing on the wall when the fork was made and realized a fight would benefit nobody. Oracle is clearly an entity that desires to cut off its nose to spite its face. I don't think the direction of cooperation is likely.

In fact, I'm really hoping the btrfs developers leave Oracle and some other Linux distribution or a foundation starts paying them. The fact they're Oracle employees is beginning to worry me. Oracle is not playing nice, and btrfs is too important to be in the hands of a company that doesn't play nice.

I predict that projects like OOo take money to keep going, and that within six months LibreOffice and other forks will be dead. Looking at the IRC transcript I don't see Oracle forcing anything. There's a council that runs OOo and some people on that council have made a fork, which is literally a competing product. The correct place for those people is TDF, not the OOoCC, that's surely obvious.

FOSS projects only have to be in competition if they want to be, if they in fact want to cooperate it's still quite easy and being on each others boards would ensure competition.

I'll make the opposite prediction, LibreOffice (a much better name IMO than OpenOffice.org) will be dominant and OO will fade to only being available from Oracle. As of right now Fedora, Ubuntu and SUSE are switching that I know of, and I thought I heard nearly every Linux distribution has announced they are switching. That's signficant marketshare. Given that OO.org doesn't allow contributions without copyright assignment and LibreOffice is already moving at about twice the development pace because they accept contributions from everyone it doesn't take a crystal ball to see that LibreOffice will soon be the default very soon.

Oracle's made a big mistake on this front. They will be just like XFree86, completely irrelevant.

If that happens (and you may well be correct), I predict that Oracle will follow up by attacking LibreOffice with patent claims in order to re-assert OpenOffice's market position.

I think it's plain to see that Oracle is not interested in FOSS principles, fairness, "community spirit", free market competition, patent-free software (regardless of Ellison's past claims) or even (as it seems at present) their reputation with us technical folk; they want to be a highly-profitable, dominant force in big-business I

Given that Oracle thinks this will lead to a conflict of interest, doesn't that kind of imply that there will be a conflict of interest? In other words, that what Oracle sees LibreOffice doing is going to conflict with where they want OpenOffice to go?

In other words, doesn't this basically mean that Oracle is actively planning to screw the pooch with OpenOffice?

Pretty much. I would add that any F/LOSS which depends on the good will of a large corporation should be ready at any time to cut and run. Nothing against big business (at least regarding this question) but the goal of a corporation is ultimately to make money. The goals of people who write free/open source software are many, though profit for it's own sake isn't usually at the top of the list. For Linus, it was at least originally "just for fun," for Stallman it's always been about the right to freedom - and you could make a long list of other reasons. Some people in the Linux and BSD communities of developers like to write software in an environment where making a mistake won't get them fired from their paying job. OpenOffice.org has been the flagship productivity suite for Linux for a while now. Since the acquisition of Sun by Oracle, it's only been a matter of time before some kind of split. I'm rooting for the fork, whatever they end up calling it, not because I don't like Oracle (I don't like Oracle, but that's not really the issue here), but because a truly independent office suite would be good to have. I hope that at least some of the devs who have been with this project for a long time continue to work on Libre Office.

That IRC meeting was painful. Is the reason OOo has been so slow to gain traction in America because nobody on the board speaks english or has the cultural fortitude to face tough issues? Thankfully louis_to was there to get down to business and make something happen.

I too was struck by the overall unprofessional tone of the discussion. The language barrier was certainly palpable, but what was up w/ all the "joking" and such. louis_to at least put down some statement of what he (and/or his faction) were demanding, but he didn't really explain how or why this was a conflict of interest.

His statements were a quoted appeal to "gentlemanship" and a statement that he didn't want to "confuse the users". That's fairly weak reasoning. There was, for example, no state

lol, as a European I usually find it painful to discuss with, or read, with/from an American because of their constant wittyness and irrelevant crap that they have to say, I blame Americanization for this painful-to-read chat log;)

No, it's the failure of Europeans to grasp American idioms and learn the simpler English grammar rules that make it painful to read Euro-English. Stop translating European idioms directly into English my little cabbage, and it will make my better sense. Correctly, it seems.

As a complete outsider, having read through the logs, it is hard for me to understand how this could possibly not be a conflict of interest.

I'm all for some Oracle bagging, as an ex-OpenSolaris user, but the comments so far seem rather unjustified in this case.

The board seems to be composed of Oracle Employees, and 3 independents (possibly more who were not present?). Comments are made that indicate that some of the Oracle employees have been involved in OpenOffice since before Sun's acquisition of Star Office. The 3 independents have all formed a competing project, and fail to understand how forming a separate project constitutes a conflict of interest. They justify this position by mentioning that they invited Oracle to join the board of their competing project. The concept of some mysterious cloud office is mentioned by one of the independents, seemingly indicating that there is no conflict. Most reasonable people would ordinarily conclude that the independents are crazy; however, due to Oracle's involvement it is apparently they who are in error.

Oracle may well have been uncooperative or something to bring forth a situation that necessitated a fork, but that hardly makes the current predicament anything less than a conflict of interest.

This all depends on the interest. I am familiar with people in the free software community whose main interest is increasing free software adoption. In that case they can fully be in support of two projects. The features may overlap and the projects may compete but the interest of free software adoption can neutralize any maliciousness that might appear in a traditional business conflict of interest situation.

Maybe the founders of LibreOffice don't consider themselves in competition with Oracle and are simply forking because Oracle wasn't attending to what they felt were important issues. Forking a project in FOSS doesn't have to be competition, it can still be a quite cooperative arrangement. Apparently Oracle is of the opinion that if you aren't with them you are against them and that's a terrible position to be in. Oracle thinks like a private company and apparently considers a fork some kind of competitive betrayal which is quite sad really. Forked projects can be quite cooperative, sharing code, project direction and working together on everything but the few items they disagree on. That's apparently NOT the direction Oracle wants to go and wants to sideline themselves completely. Not to worry, LibreOffice is now the default in nearly all the major Linux Distributions and I have no doubt within a few years OO will be a footnote in history. Too bad Oracle's stupid.

The board seems to be composed of Oracle Employees, and 3 independents (possibly more who were not present?)

No, there are just three independents on the council. Without those three it's 100% run by Oracle, and while they may find bodies to fill the seats nobody will think they have any real influence over Oracle. In practice it's the community council that is being dissolved, at least the "community" part of it.

This is Open Source. There doesn't have to be a conflict of interest. Netscape and Mozilla got along fine for a long time. If there is a conflict of interest, it is created by Oracle. It's interesting that the Oracle employees won't explain precisely what the conflict of interest is.

At some point some open source projects developers may go in a direction that the distribution vendors and end uses may disagree with. It is the licensing which allows a fork of the project to develop that sets the open source development model apart from the pure proprietary development model. Apache, X.org and even the current version of the GNU GCC compiler toolset have been all derived from an outside fork of an existing open source project. No vendor or open source software developer can block development for any substantial period of time without the risk of the development being taken over by a descendant of the same project -- it's called evolution.

Every time the leading members/developers of each of those original projects complained bitterly about the interlopers.

The longer the original team remains entrenched in their design/implementation choices, the less the original team control has over the successor project and the less original product's market share of total users.

This will remain true for all freely licensed source code that Oracle has purchased or inherited. Even for the forks of the GPL licensed Java.

In the end freely licensed source code can have no dictators, only obsoleted dickhead.

Understandable move from Oracle. Anyone finding out that their wife/husband/life partner is having a side affair would ask them to move out.

It is really really sad, but I am not so sure about the ethical steps from Oracle's side up to this point. What made these guys create LibreOffice in the first place and why doesn't Oracle answer to that more constructively? Does LibreOffice really have the momentum already to withstand this move or is Oracle using the early stage?

At this stage we are not in a win-win situation, and things may get worse than the frustrated name calling of a bitter drama-queen feud.

LibreOffice and co. have been a barely known contender in the free Office market so far, while OO.o has the market pretty much sealed up.

After this little stunt, and if this trend continues in the future, I would be surprised if OO.o remained the office of choice in Ubuntu 11.04, or really any of the Linux distros who pride themselves on free software. Oracle is destroying its free-software products.

A naive person might ask why they bought Sun in the first place, if they are clueless about how to manage free software. A cynic would answer that they bought it in order to run OO.o, MySQL and Java into the ground.

Hence, the need for better regulation of the "free market" when it comes to anti-competitive behavior as demonstrated by Oracle. Hands up if you still think an unregulated free market is a good idea and better for consumers?

I use OO as a file-conversion utility (but never for anything else), and was originally dismissive of the amount of attention this thread generated. Over the years, I have supported companies large and small. If you include my direct reports, I have supported thousands of users. Maybe twice in that time have I run into (or heard of) anyone who disclosed that they use OO at home or work.

So I did a little Googling and was amazed to find that multiple sources ". . . estimated that market share of Open Office amounts to 7% for office use and 20% for home use."

If accurate, this makes OO a larger threat to Microsoft than Google as each copy of OO represents a bigger threat to one of Microsoft's three significant streams of profitable revenue (Office, Windows, and Xbox) than anything offered up thus far by Google.

That this "underground" success has happened despite distro companies from Redhat to Ubuntu failing to develop marketing campaigns to bring OO to greater public attention means the opportunity for greater success for OO may still lay before us.

Right now, iPad and Android users are adopting non-MS office apps by the thousands. Perhaps forks like Libre Office will rejuvenate efforts to finally bring a cross-platform (Windows, MAC OS, MAC IOS, Android, and Linux) office that will simplify support efforts.

Answer: "It *IS* OpenOffice. It uses the exact same code even though the company that owns it was bought out by a rival that now wants to control what you do with their version. But the code is free forever, so they can't *make* you upgrade to something inferior (unlike their competitors that we moved away from), so someone has created an identical but still usable version and just had to change the name. That's 100% legal and there will be no arguments or court cases to trouble us over that because our license is perpetual. Your apps will always still work, but the next upgrade might have a different logo on it. Your IT guys don't have to do anything new to upgrade, there are no massive system-wide changes, it's still the same program. The icon design might change on your desktop a little, that's about it, but the file formats are still perfectly 100% the same and the software is still perfectly 100% supported, and still running the same code it always was. But instead of the half-a-dozen uninspired programmers put on the project by the new owners, we have the same community of thousands of programmers that worked on the "old" versions and know the code off-by-heart. We also have the choice to keep using the old code forever, or move to the new version by the new horrible company, or use the new version from the old community, which is kinda why we moved onto Open Source in the first place. Incidentally, how is [sister company]'s upgrade to Office 2010 going?"

> Answer: "It *IS* OpenOffice. It uses the exact same code even though the company> that owns it was bought out by a rival that now wants to control what you do> with their version

Excellent point. Viewed that way, this is more like one of Microsoft's productname changes than a product change. At this point, there is no difference betweenthe products (It's not MS Office, it's MS Office.NET!)

Ok, you're crazy. This isn't like proprietary software where everyone's in direct competition, and every user counts because every user is another dollar in your coffers. This is open source where code and be freely shared, and could flow from OO to LO and back again, and the raw number of users doesn't matter as long as you can maintain a critical level of developers. How many people will use both? Could be a lot. I've jumped back and forth between GNU Emacs and XEmacs a number of times in my life. I